Amy Irving

Amy Irving is an American actor whose screen career began with a defining appearance in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). She played Sue Snell, the sympathetic classmate who tries to make amends to Carrie White by asking her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the prom. The film’s brutal climax returns Sue to Carrie’s home, where she witnesses the aftermath of the telekinetic catastrophe. Born September 10, 1953, in Palo Alto, California, Irving grew up in a theatrical family. Her father, Jules Irving, was a stage and film director, and her mother, Priscilla Pointer, was an actor. Irving attended the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and later studied at the London Academy of Music and Drama, experiences that connected her early work to the repertory and stage traditions that also shaped her parents’ careers. Irving received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Yentl (1983), Barbra Streisand’s musical drama adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fiction. As Hadass Vishkower, she is the young woman intended to marry Streisand’s character, Yentl, who has been living as a man in order to study Jewish religious texts. The performance placed Irving alongside Streisand and Mandy Patinkin in a film whose songs were written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman with music by Michel Legrand. Her other notable De Palma collaboration was The Fury (1978), in which she played Gillian Bellaver, a teenager with psychic abilities who becomes entangled in a government project involving telekinesis. In Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988), Irving carried a markedly different romantic comedy as Isabelle “Izzy” Grossman, a Manhattan bookstore employee pulled between a literary suitor and the pickle seller Sam Posner, played by Peter Riegert. In Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, A Love Story (1989), Irving played Masha, one of the women in the life of Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor in postwar New York. The film adapts another Isaac Bashevis Singer novel and features Ron Silver as Herman and Anjelica Huston as Tamara, his first wife, who reappears after he has assumed she died in the war. Irving was married to filmmaker Steven Spielberg from 1985 to 1989; their son, Max Spielberg, was born in 1985. She later married documentary filmmaker Kenneth Bowser in 2007. Across her work, Irving has moved between horror, period musical, romantic comedy, literary adaptation, and stage performance, with her most widely recognized screen roles often placing an apparently ordinary woman amid extraordinary pressures.